The Nuclear Bill That Ended the Soviet Empire

Описание: On April 26, 1986, a nuclear reactor exploded in northern Ukraine.
The world remembers Chernobyl as a technological disaster.
But for the Soviet Union, it was something far worse.
It was a bill.
This film explores how Chernobyl became a financial catastrophe that the USSR could not absorb—arriving at the exact moment oil prices collapsed, hard currency vanished, and the Soviet economy lost its last margin for error.
Containing the reactor required a mobilization on the scale of war.
Evacuations, new cities, compensation laws, healthcare for hundreds of thousands of liquidators, lost farmland, energy shortfalls, and decades of environmental monitoring followed.
The costs never ended.
As the treasury emptied, the state printed money, borrowed from the West, and watched trust evaporate. Shortages deepened. Republics stopped sending taxes. The center could no longer enforce the empire.
Years later, Mikhail Gorbachev would say that Chernobyl mattered more than perestroika in the collapse of the Soviet Union.
This is not a story about radiation alone.
It is the story of what happens when a system built for control cannot afford failure.
Empires don’t always fall to invasion.
Sometimes, they collapse under the weight of unpaid consequences.


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